2020 Provost’s Award

The bachelor’s degree program in Athletic Training (BSAT) has been named the winner of the fourth annual Provost’s Assessment Award at UA.

The award, established by Provost Kevin Whitaker in 2017, recognizes excellence in program-level assessment and improvement of student learning outcomes (SLOs). Each year’s winner is selected by the University Assessment Council (UAC) from a pool of degree program assessment reports that most strongly exhibit the qualifying criteria: meaningful, measurable, manageable, and innovative. The other outstanding finalists for the 2020 award were the Civil Engineering BSCE and Management MA programs.

The CAATE-accredited BSAT program is offered by the Health Science Department within UA’s College of Human Environmental Sciences (CHES). The BSAT curriculum is designed to instill key disciplinary competencies, and the program assesses each its SLOs with an impressive variety of direct measures including rubric-based review of course exams and projects, clinical evaluations, and domain scores on nationally administered board exams. Program faculty routinely “drill down” into the assessment data to find areas where pedagogical adjustments could further enhance student mastery of competencies.  The University Assessment Council was impressed by the clear descriptions, alignment, evaluation tools, triangulation of data, thoughtful interpretations of results, and strong commitment to improvement in the BSAT assessment report.

Athletic Training faculty, including program coordinator and assessment guru Dr. Lizzie Hibberd, will be invited to a celebratory luncheon with the Office for Academic Affairs later in the year.